SPIKE

THE RABID
MEDIA
WATCHDOG



[Every month, Spike will tell you what he's unearthed about Puget Sound's print and broadcast media as he sniffs around journalist haunts - dive taverns, narrow hallways in government buildings and the like. He also loves having tasty morsels phoned or written in.]



Recession-Stung Weekly Stings Staffers;
Publisher Brewster Waxes Journalistic

Nineteen-ninety-three already has been a bad year for the Seattle Weekly.

In January, publisher David Brewster laid off three people, cut back the hours of two mainstay staff writers and cancelled the contracts of two other reporters.

And, what's worse, sources inside the Weekly tell us that the publication may have to resort to free distribution if its aggressive subscription campaign - 25 cents an issue for a year's worth - doesn't help it rebound from a significant drop in advertising revenue.

As one of the country's few non-free newsweeklies, the Weekly gets an unusually large chunk of its revenues from subscriptions and newsstand sales. But its 75-cent sticker-price keeps thousands of people from picking it up, therefore making it tougher for Weekly ad reps to persuade businesses to buy space in the paper. Becoming a freebie conceivably would demolish the last palpable barrier between an advertiser and a would-be reader.

Brewster acknowledged to us that the Weekly is "adjusting to a slower growth rate than expected." In a somewhat confusing denial, Brewster said that the notion of going to a freebie currently is not on the table, but that he was not "deadset against" the idea, and that he and other managers talk about it once in a while.

Regardless, the Weekly's thinning staff size and page count, along with its bargain-basement subscription blitz, spell trouble for Seattle's most popular "alternative" publication. One has to wonder whether it's reexam-

ination time for the 18-year-old paper, where even people on the inside admit that its temples are starting to gray.

A publication with high commercial appeal, the Weekly's success ebbs and flows with its advertising. Small- and medium-sized businesses, historically the Weekly's old faithfuls, are continuing to cut back on their advertising as the recession festers in the Northwest. "The real battle we're having," Brewster said, "is over meat-and-potatoes advertisers - the medium-sized businesses. Retail here is about the worst of any city in the country."

The drop-off has forced the Weekly , as they say in board rooms, to "restructure personnel" - trimming its team of 10 staff writers to eight, slashing hours and ripping up contracts. Unfortunately for editorial staffers, they often are the first to go when the money tightens. (After all, you wouldn't fire ad reps when you need to sell more ads.)

Axed outright was leisure/retail staff writer Rose Pike, who had been with the Weekly for more than 10 years, having risen from the rank of editorial assistant. Music staff writer Douglas McLennan and food writer Schuyler Ingle had their contracts cancelled, though Brewster said McLennan actually is writing more stories now that he's a freelancer - that is, getting paid per story.

Staff writers Mary Bruno and Paul Roberts both had their hours slashed to 20 a week - Bruno from 32, and Roberts from 40. Also laid off were part-time copy editor and occasional book reviewer Sally Anderson and an advertising support-services worker.

"Our central staff is really producing more material than we've got pages for. We were having to hold articles," Brewster explained. "I don't mean to say, though, that the reason (for the personnel moves) wasn't disappointing ad sales."

Ingle, an author and former writer for the Los Angeles Times, said that despite being "destitute," he was not bitter about losing his job. Having been through the Weekly's revolving door once before, in the early 80s, Ingle said he maintained realistic expectations during his second stint there. He was, however, critical of Brewster's personal management practices.



Brewster:
"When people
say 'Why aren't
you more like
the Village
Voice
? I say,
'Should I ask the
Village Voice
why they're not
more like the
Weekly?'"


"All this David Brewster stuff about being one big happy family is a bunch of hogwash, " Ingle said. "It's one of the most dysfunctional families in the Northwest.

"He tends to wait until you have your first baby or get a mortgage and then he fires you. He has a great style," he said. "Brewster talks about this 'one big happy family' thing and then someone like Rose gets fired after 11 years, and after being told she was such a wonderful person doing wonderful things. That's the style of the Weekly."

Ingle said that, in part because of Brewster's attempts to manufacture camaraderie, Weekly employees get lulled into a false sense of job security.

"People working there maintain a remarkable level of naivete. If anything, maybe Rose (getting fired) will be the big signal to people working there."

Pike declined our invitation for an interview, and attempts to reach McLennan were unsuccessful.

The cutbacks come as the ad-dollar pot, in a town heretofore known for its generous advertisers, has begun to dry up, and with it, possibly the Weekly's giddy adolescence. While the Weekly's advertising content is hovering at a healthy 63 percent, fewer ads mean fewer pages. From the glory days of the 90-to-100-page editions, the Weekly in recent months has thinned to 70 to 80 pages, with some issues dipping into the 60s.

Brewster said the Weekly's main competition for ad dollars are radio stations and newspapers, which he said have parlayed special sections on such things as weddings and neighborhood news into advertising successes.

"What the dailies are doing is becoming a collection of niche publications. They are able to compete better against niche markets like ours."

Brewster said that tough economic times also bring out more of the wheeler-and-dealer in ad reps. "In a competitive market, ad rates get very rubbery."

To help combat these realities, the Weekly - which gets a surprising two-thirds of its circulation from home delivery - has begun a newspaper-style subscription promotion, which Brewster hopes will lift the paper's circulation from its current 34,000 a week to 40,000 by the end of the year. He said the campaign was "going very well," and that circulation was "rising dramatically."

Weekly sources, who asked not to be named, told us that the promotion is a last-ditch effort to avoid having to shift to free distribution. Brewster said the sources were wrong ... sort of.

"There is nothing like that going on. The fact that we have a free paper on the Eastside (Eastside Week ) invariably has people raising the question of us going free in Seattle. We are enjoying success with the Weekly , so there is no reason to think that we would change anything," Brewster said, adding, "Though I am not deadset against Eastside Week becoming a pay paper or the Weekly becoming a free paper. We occasionally have those conversations."

Though the recession is an easy scapegoat for publishers, it is no secret - even to Brewster - that many Seattle readers have grown discontented with what they perceive to be the Weekly's mainstream approach of covering local news. The topic got Brewster speaking freely about what he sees as the Weekly's place in Seattle's print media community.

"Most free circulation papers tend to go more in the direction of eye-opening stories, in the "holy shit" direction," he said. "I see it in a different way. The Weekly certainly sets itself against conventional reporting, but it is not an ideological paper. It is not a "Things are really terrible" paper.

"My models are more like the New Republic , the Atlantic , and the New Yorker. To me there is a higher calling than melodramatic reporting. If you're going to be predictably left wing, you'll just preaching to the converted," he said. "We have reporters who can out-think rather than out-scoop the competition. I like complexity rather than black-and-white reporting. Our reporters are hired to go in that direction.

"I never want to say that the way the Weekly does it is the way it should be done. But when people say 'Why aren't you more like the Village Voice ?' I say, 'Should I ask the Village Voice why they're not more like the Weekly ?'"

Brewster, getting to the heart of the matter, then talked about his editorial philosophy in the context of reader perception and commercial viability in a town he believes is too small and too consensus-minded for his publication to take on a more daring, in-your-face ethos.

"Seattle has a culture of centrism, and I am an explorer of common ground," he said. "In big cities like Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, it's easier for publications to form into camps and still have a lot of readers. But if publications divide up that way here, you're not going to get a lot of advertisers. You'll have things to write about, but they're only going to make yourself feel good. Our paper needs credibility."

Brewster called Seattle a "middle-class, well-educated bourgeois town" that, ironically, he wishes had a "more vital" political environment. He also said he welcomed the recent proliferation of small-budget freebies and the cracking open of historically stodgy dailies.

"The (Bellevue) Journal-American is running personal ads now," he said. "Journalism is in an interesting, fertile, fluid period. I'm glad to see a lot of stuff being tried."

See a reader response to this article.





Times Editorial Page Turns Right into Carlson

The Seattle Times has just signed on John Carlson, Puget Sound's most visible conservative commentator, to write weekly columns and monthly essays for its editorial page. Carlson probably is best known for being half of KIRO's Point-Counterpoint feature and for his appearances on Channel Nine's Sunday "Seattle Week in Review" show, a less cacophonous version of the "McLaughlin Report."

Carlson, who runs his own right-wing think tank, the Washington Institute for Policy Studies in Bellevue, had written a weekly column for Bellevue's Journal-American since 1990. But after lunch dates with Times publisher/CEO Frank Blethen and editorial page editor Mindy Cameron, Carlson was offered a contract to move his words and ideas to the other side of the lake. Carlson said the contract is open-ended.

Carlson, 33, got his start in journalism in 1983, as the publisher of the Washington Spectator. "It was a campus response to UW Daily ," he told us, "a conservative alternative paper." From there, he wrote monthly essays for the Weekly before starting his think tank in 1985, to "look at conservative issues a la Jack Kemp ... because Washington Republicans had no agenda and didn't know what to do."

Though the Times always has had a healthy mix of left- and right-wing columnists, Carlson said that the paper "wanted to bring some of the balance they had on the national column front to the local column front."

Since his first column ran Feb. 16, Carlson said that mail to the Times has been split about even between positive and negative reaction.

While an articulate and well-informed voice of the right, Carlson has been criticized for his penchant to oversimplify arguments with the almost religious use of statistics, omitting the often more important human factors at the heart of the social, economic and educational problems that he explores.

Still, people aren't exactly rioting in the streets over Carlson's rise to prominence, perhaps because most of us realize that all debates are enhanced by the interjection of all points of view. In that context, Carlson's ideas should only make the Times' editorial page more comprehensive and useful.

See a reader response to this article.





KIRO News: Still Boxed In

Expectedly, KIRO's "News Outside of the Box" format has gotten the attention of many. But it may not be the kind of attention that the station was hoping to get.

Instead of people instantly taking to the concept of newscasters strolling through a high-tech set with "real-live" journalists working in the backdrop, all of the hype may lead viewers to be hypercritical of the experiment. A more subtle, less hyped-up transition may have been a wiser strategy. Though we imagine it would be tough not to brag about spending $1.5 million on a new studio.

Appearances aside, the new format hasn't seemed to have done anything to beef up KIRO's news content. Close your eyes, and you wouldn't notice any difference. Glitzy sets and the more relaxed, hands-in-the-pockets demeanor of on-air personalities likely will not leave a lasting impression in the minds and remote controls of viewers.

People we talked to envisioned, with some excitement, anchor people spending more time outside of the studio, perhaps bringing us more in-depth, less theatrical news coverage. What we got was broadcasters with a new way of talking into the camera, and a new way of talking with their hands.

Good luck, KIRO. But no one is expecting KOMO and KING to flatter you with imitation.


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Contents on this page were published in the April, 1993 edition of the Washington Free Press.
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